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, Companion of the Prophet Muḥammad of the Ḳurays̲h̲ clan of ʿAbd al-Dār. The son of rich parents, this handsome young man had already attracted attention by his elegant appearance when Muḥammad’s preaching made so deep an impression upon him that he abandoned the advantages of his social position to join the dispersed adherents of the Prophet. Tradition dilates on the contrast between his former luxurious life and later poverty but these, like such stories in general, are somewhat suspicious. When his parents endeavoured to prevent him taking part in the worship of the bel…

, a place roughly halfway between Minā and ʿArafat where the pilgrims returning from ʿArafat spend the night between 9 and 10 D̲h̲u ’l-Ḥid̲j̲d̲j̲a, after performing the two evening ṣalāts . On the next morning they set off before sunrise and climb up through the valley of Muhassir to Minā. Other names for this place are al-Mas̲h̲ʿar al-ḥarām , from sūra II, 194, and D̲j̲amʿ (cf. Laylat D̲j̲amʿ : Ibn Saʿd, ii/1, 129, 1. 6); but D̲j̲amʿ, according to another statement, comprises the whole stretch between ʿArafat and Minā, both included, so that Yawm D̲j̲amʿ ( Kitāb al-Ag̲h̲ānī …

, or ‘the ʿArīs̲h̲ of Egypt’, the Rhinokorura of the ancients, town on the Mediterranean coast situated in a fertile oasis surrounded by sand, on the frontier between Palestine and Egypt. The name is found as early as the first centuries of our era in the form of Laris. According to the ordinary view, which is presupposed also in the well-known anecdote about ʿAmr b. al-ʿĀṣ’s expedition to Egypt, the town belonged to Egypt. The inhabitants, according to al-Yaʿḳūbī, belonged to the Ḏj̲ud̲h̲ām. Ib…

is the name of two localities: 1. A place on the frontier of Yamāma, famous for the bloody battle in which Musaylima and the Banū Ḥanïfa were defeated by Ḵh̲ālid. In its neighbourhood was a grove ( ḥadīḳa ), surrounded by a wall and, before this battle, known by the name of "Raḥmān’s garden"; later on it was called "garden of death". (F. Buhl) Bibliography Ṭabarī, i, 1937-1940 Balād̲h̲urī (de Goeje), 88 Yāḳūt, Muʿd̲j̲am ii, 226 iii, 694. 2. A place of residence of the G̲h̲assānid princes in Ḏj̲awlān; it is probably identical with the present ʿAḳrabāʾ in the province of Ḏj̲ēdūr. Bibliography Yāḳūt…

, a town in the centre of a fertile plain in the land east of Jordan, east of the southern end of the Dead Sea, about two hours’ journey south of Karak, renowned for the defeat of the Muslims there in D̲j̲umādā I of the year 8. ¶ According to the Arabic account, the reason why Muḥammad sent 3,000 men to this region was that an envoy whom he had sent to the king (presumably the imperial governor of Boṣrā) had been murdered by a G̲h̲assānid, but the real reason seems to have been that he wished to bring the (Christian or pagan) Arabs living the…

, an ancient tribe, frequently mentioned in the Ḳurʾān. Its history is related only in sporadic allusions. It was a mighty nation that lived immediately after the time of Noah, and became haughty on account of its great prosperity (vii, 69; xli, 15). The edifices of the ʿĀdites are spoken of in xxvi, 128 f.; cf. in lxxxix, 6-7 the expression: "ʿĀd, Iram of the pillars" [see iram d̲h̲āt al-ʿimād ]. According to xlvi, 21, the ʿĀdites inhabited al-Aḥḳāf [ q.v.], the sand dunes. The prophet sent to them, their "brother" Hūd [ q.v.], was treated by them just as Muḥammad was later treated by …

, a Copt maiden, according to one statement, daughter of a man named S̲h̲amʿūn, who was sent with her sister Sīrīn by the Muḳawḳis [ q.v.]in the year 6 or 7/627-9 to Muḥammad as a gift of honour (according to another authority there were four of them). The Prophet made her his concubine, while he gave Sīrīn to Ḥassān b. T̲h̲ābit [ q.v.]. He was very devoted to her and gave her a house in the upper town of Medina, where he is said to have visited her by day and night; this house was called after her the mas̲h̲raba of the mother of Ibrāhīm. To the great joy of the Prophet,…

¶ , “the Pure Soul”, ʿAlid rebel, together with his full brother Ibrāhīm [ q.v.] against the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr at Medina in 145/762-3. He and Ibrāhīm had, according to al-Wāḳidī, been brought up as future rulers, and Muḥammad was called al-Mahdī by his father. As early, as the reign of the Umayyad caliph His̲h̲ām, the two sectarians al-Mug̲h̲īra b. Saʿīd al-ʿId̲j̲lī and Bayān b. Samʿān [ q.v.], who did not recognise Muḥammad b. ʿAlī al-Bāḳir [ q.v.], endeavoured to make propaganda for him. When signs of the imminent collapse of Umayyad rule became apparent after …

, the Acco (ʿAkkō) of the Old Testament, the Ptolemais of the Greeks, the Acre of the French, town on the Palestinian seaboard. ʿAkkā was captured by the Arabs under the command of S̲h̲uraḥbīl b. Ḥasana. As the town had suffered in the wars with the Byzantines, Muʿāwiya rebuilt it, and constructed there naval yards which the Caliph His̲h̲ām later transferred to Tyre. Ibn Ṭūlūn constructed great stone embankments round the port; al-Maḳdisī, whose grandfather executed the work, gives an interestin…

(a.) verbal noun of ṭāfa with bi of place, “encircling”; in the language of religious cults the running round or circumambulation of a sacred object, a stone, altar, etc. There are traces of the rite having existed among the Israelites, cf. especially Ps. xxvi. 6, and the ceremony of the feast of booths in the time of the Second Temple, where the altar is circumambulated once in the first six days and seven times on the seventh. The rite, however, was also found among Persians, Indians, Buddhists, Romans and others and is t…

, lit. “pebble”, (pl. d̲j̲mār ). The name is given to three halts in the Vale of Minā, where pilgrims returning from ʿArafāt during their annual pilgrimage ( ḥad̲j̲d̲j̲ ) stop to partake in the ritual throwing of stones. The Lisān al-ʿArab explains that the place acquired its name either through the act of throwing, or through the stones themselves, which accumulate as more pilgrims perform the rite. Travelling from ʿArafāt, one comes first to al-d̲j̲amra al-ūlā (or al-dunyā ), then, 150 metres further on, to al-d̲j̲amra al-wusṭā . They are in the middle of th…

, “depression”, “plain encircled by higher ground”, a geographical term denoting various regions in the Muslim countries. 1. The best known is the G̲h̲awr in Palestine, which corresponds with the deep hollow, called Aulôn in the Septuagint, through which the Jordan flows, between Lake Tiberias and the Dead Sea, and which is merely a section of the central Syro-Palestinian rift-valley. At first, the G̲h̲awr consists of a plain, overshadowed by the mountains of Samaria on the one side and Mount ʿAd̲j̲lūn on …

, the Edrei of the Bible, to-day Derʿa, chief town of Ḥawrān, 106 km. south of Damascus. Situated on the borderline between a basaltic region and the desert, the town, formerly renowned for its wine and oil, was always a great market for cereals and an important centre of trade routes. Before the Assyrian conquest (732 B.C.) the kingdoms of Damascus and Israel contended for it; some scholars have identified it with the Aduri of the Amarna tablets. The capital of Batanea, Adraa was taken by Antio…

, Yāfa , conventionally Jaffa, older Joppa, a port on the Palestinian seaboard, in pre-modern times the port of entry for Jerusalem, since 1950 part of the municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo in the State of Israel (lat. 32° 05′ N., long. 34° 46′ E.). Situated on a 30 m/100 feet-high promontory on the otherwise straight coastline of central Palestine, Jaffa is a very ancient town. Thutmosis III’s forces seized the Canaanite town of ϒ-pw in the 15th century B.C. and it became a provincial capital during the Egyptian New Kingdom; since the 1950s, archaeological excavations h…

, a town of northwestern Arabia, lying inland from the eastern shore of the Gulf of ʿAḳaba; it is mentioned in the mediaeval Islamic geographers as lying on the pilgrimage route between the Ḥid̲j̲āz and Syria, which there went inland to avoid the mountainous coast of the Gulf. The name is connected with that of the tribe of Midianites known from the Old Testament (LXX Μαδιαμ, Μαδιαν; in Josephus Μαδιηνἵται, ἡ Μαδιηνὴ χῶρα) but it can hardly be used without further consideration to identify the original home of this tribe, as the town might be…

, Modern Hebrew Nāṣerat, Nazareth, the home of Jesus, a town of northern Palestine, since 1948 in Israel, situated in lat. 32° 42’ N. and long. 35° 17’E. at a height of 505 m/1,600 ft. It lies in a depression sloping to the south surrounded by hills in a fertile district. While the hills to the north and northeast are not very high, in the northwest the D̲j̲ebel al-Sīk̲h̲ rises to 1,600 feet above sealevel. The name of the town, which does not occur in the Old Testament, is found in the New and in the Greek fathers of the Church …

, a town in central Palestine, the name of which is derived from that of Flavia Neapolis built in honour of Vespasian. Its Old Testament predecessor was Shechem, which however lay more to the east on the site of the present village of Balāṭa (the name is explained by S. Klein, in ZDPV, xxxv, 38-9; cf. R. Hartmann, in ibid., xxxiii, 175-6, as “platanus”, from the evidence of the pilgrim of Bordeaux and the Midras̲h̲ Gen. rb ., c. 81, § 3). According to Eusebius, the place where the old town stood was pointed out in a suburb of Neapolis. The correctne…

(a.), pl. masākīn , miskīnūn , “poor, destitute”. The word is an ancient Semitic one. In Akkadian, muškēnu/maškēnu apparently in the first place designated a social class between the full citizens and the slaves, and thence acquired the sense of “poor, destitute” (see E.A. Speiser, The muškēnum , in Orientalia , N.S. xxvii [1958], 19-28; Chicago Akkadian dictionary, Letter M , Part ii, 272-6; Von Soden, Akkadisches Wörterbuch , ii, 8641; idem, Muškenum und die Mawālī des frühen Islam , in ZA, N.F. xxii [1964], 133-41). In the latter sense, it appears in Aramaic as meskīnā and in OT Hebrew as mi…

, an ancient oasis settlement of northwestern Arabia, now in Saudi Arabia (lat. 27° 37’ N., long. 38° 30’ E.). According to the mediaeval Islamic geographers, it lay in the region called al-Maḥad̲j̲d̲j̲āt, and was four days’ journey south of Dūmat al-D̲j̲andal [ q.v.]; al-Muḳaddasī, 107, 250, 252, localises it at three stages from al-Ḥid̲j̲r [ q.v.] (in fact, Taymāʾ is some 110 km/70 miles from al-Ḥid̲j̲r/ Madā’in Ṣāliḥ), four stages from Tabūk [ q.v.] and four from the Wādī ’l-Ḳurā [ q.v.]. It lies in a depression, the length of which J.A. Jaussen and R. Sauvignac put at 3.2…

an isolated mountain (known locally as a ḥaḍba ) located in Nad̲j̲d at about 24° 48′ N, 43° 54′ E, some 60 km. north-west of al-Dawādimī, 25 km. south and east of Nafī, and 15 km. west of Wādī al-Ris̲h̲āʾ. The mountain, which consists of reddish stone, rises abruptly from the surrounding gravel plains. About seven km. in length and three km. wide, D̲j̲abala runs from south-west to northeast with three main wādīs descending from its slopes…

(a.), religion, sect. Although the Arab philologists claim this term as a native Arabic word (cf. Nöldeke, in ZDMG, lvii ‘903], 413), their explanations are so farfetched as to render it almost certain that the term stems from Hebrew and Jewish and Christian Aramaic milla , Syriac melltā “utterance, word”, translating the Greek logos . It does not seem to have any pre-Islamic attestations, hence may have been a borrowing by Muḥammad himself. In the Ḳurʾān, it always means “religion”. It occurs fifteen times, including three ti…

, the Greek Tripolis, called “of Syria” in the Arabic sources to distinguish it from Ṭarābulus al-G̲h̲arb [ q.v.] “of the West”, Tripoli in Libya, an historic town of the Mediterranean coast of the Levant, to the north of D̲j̲ubayl and Batrūn [ q.vv.]. It lies partly on and partly beside a hill at the exit of a deep ravine through which flows a river, the Nahr Ḳadīs̲h̲a (Arabic, Abū ʿAlī). West of it stretches a very fertile plain covered with woods, which terminate in a peninsula on which lies the port of al-Mīnā. The harbour is protect…

, the Prophet of Islam. 1. The Prophet’s life and career. 2. The Prophet in popular Muslim piety. 3. The Prophet’s image in Europe and the West. 1. The Prophet’s life and career. Belief that Muḥammad is the Messenger of God ( Muḥammadun rasūlu ’llāh ) is second only to belief in the Oneness of God ( lā ilāha illā ’llāh ) according to the s̲h̲ahāda [ q.v.], the quintessential Islamic creed. Muḥammad has a highly exalted role at the heart of Muslim faith. At the same time the Ḳurʾān and Islamic orthodoxy insist that he was fully human with no supernatural powers. That Muḥammad was one of the greate…

, the Arabic name for the Jordan River, used also from early Islamic times onwards to designate the regions adjacent to the river’s course. 1. The river This appears in Arabic as the nahr al-Urdunn , in Old Testament and later Hebrew as ha-ϒardēn , and in the Septuagint and the classical geographers as ô ’Ιορδάνης. After the Crusading period, local Arabic usage often referred to it as al-S̲h̲arīʿa [ al-kabīra ] “the [Great] watering-place”. It was, and still is, revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims, by Christians in particular on account of…